This one belongs in a history of private defense:

Unsuccessful war stimulated more than murmur. While Lancaster was bogged down in Brittany, English merchant ships were harassed and captured with impunity by French and Scottish pirates. When the merchants complained, the nobles and prelates of the King’s Council replied only that defensive action was up to Lancaster and his fleet.

At this, a rich alderman and future Mayor of London, John Philpot, Master of the Grocers’ Company, assembled a private force of ships with a thousand sailors and men-at-arms and went forth to battle the pirates, several of whom he captured together with their prize ships. When, after a triumphant welcome in London, he was summoned by the Council to answer for acting without the King’s leave, his hot reply summed up the growing exasperation of the Third Estate with the less than than adequate performance of the Second. He had spent his money and risked his men, Philpot said, not to shame nobles or win knightly fame, but “in pity for the misery of the people and country which, from being a noble realm and dominion over other nations, has through your supineness been exposed to the ravages of the vilest race. Since you would not lift a hand in its defense, I exposed myself and my property for the safety and deliverance of our country.” Even if Philpot and his fellow merchants were primarily concerned with the safety and deliverance of their trade, his complaint of the country’s defenders was none the less valid.

– Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Chapter 17: "Coucy’s Rise," p. 352.

And now a word from Scott Lahti (1, 2):

…I pass along my latest Austrian-”inspired” drive-by, prompted by a caricature of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s presumed intention to inject ”liquidity” into the rattled credit markets (attached image), sent to me by my roommate at Hillsdale College (1980-1), a Misesian-Austrian economist…. Only those ignorant of 1970s pop lyrics are assured of being spared the worst.

Bern, Baby, Bern (Fiscal Inferno), or –

Benny and the Debts! *

*You know I didn’t read it in a magazine…**

**And ever since our ”raining”, pennies-from-Heaven monetary carjackers began to sing along to ”Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road”, abandoning (g)old standards in favor of ”payola”, they’ve made the nation’s Brink’s trucks as vulnerable to blowouts as a candle in the wind…***

***At least one band had the better part of hard-money wisdom in singing ”Give me silver, blue and gold”, which is not Bad Company to find yourself in when inflation is rampant – dunno about the ”blue” part, but, hey – ”two out of three ain’t bad”, or, Half a (Meat) Loaf is Better Than None…

Lew Rockwell on the agenda of schooling:

[T]he structure of the institution doing the educating matters a great deal. If the institution is owned and managed by the state, we can expect that the ideas it promotes will be favorable to the regime.

This should not be a controversial claim. If, for example, Wal-Mart were running our schools, who would be surprised that criticism of Wal-Mart would be kept to a minimum and that pro-Wal-Mart attitudes would be cultivated among students? We would expect that. It would not shock us. We would just consider the source.

But how rarely do we consider the source when it comes to state-funded education! There is an assumption that people make that education when sponsored by the state will be objective and keep the student’s best interest at heart. This assumption makes no sense whatever, but it is nonetheless widely held. We encounter this often in dealing with the issue of elementary and secondary schools. If someone attends a Baptist or Catholic school, people ask how they can stand all that religious indoctrination. But have you ever heard a student in public school questioned as to how they can stand all that statist indoctrination? It’s not likely.

The ownership and control of institutions does in fact matter for the quality of education a student receives and what the student will be taught.

– Lew Rockwell, "The First and Next 25 Years,"
a talk delivered on the 25th anniversary
of the founding of the Mises Institute

This is from Jim Fedako’s “Word for the day: fungible”:

Fungible means interchangeable. The word comes into play when (inter alia) earmarked funds end up in a general account. These funds are then free to be used for purposes other than intended.

Example: You would like to go on a vacation but you have unpaid car repair bills. A wealthy uncle hears that you are having financial trouble and sends money to help. However, he would never have agree to pay for your vacation — he’s nice, but not that nice.

Once your uncle’s money is deposited into your checking account, you are free to spend it as you please. You then get to pay off your bills and go on vacation. In essence, you paid your bills (a necessity) while your uncle funded your vacation.

Jim goes on to make a great point about about government-subsidized health “insurance.”